"Then I will give your rains in their season, and the land shall yield her produce and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit." Leviticus 26:4.

The Hebrew month of Iyar celebrates two glorious days in modern Israeli history:
Independence Day and Jerusalem Day. The first celebrates the declaration of the
establishment of the State of Israel on 5 Iyar, 5708 (1948); the second, 19
years later, marks our miraculous military victory over the invading armed
forces of our Arab neighbors culminating in our liberation of the holy city of
Jerusalem and the sacred Temple Mount on 28 Iyar, 5727 (1967).

The State
of Israel and the city of Jerusalem resonate much more deeply than just a
national country and its capital city, its seat of governance.

In this
commentary, I shall attempt to define Zionism and the two separate concepts that
inform the nation-state of Israel as one sanctity and the sacred city Jerusalem
as a qualitatively distinct sanctity.

In the Grace after Meals, there are
two separate blessings” one for “the land and its nutritional sustenance” and
another for “the building of Jerusalem.” In the Amida prayer, which is made up
of 18 blessings, we make a request that God “bless all of our different types of
agricultural produce for good, grant dew and rain on the land and satisfy us
with its goodness.” This refers to the bounty of the “good land,” which is what
the Bible calls the Land of Israel. Our seventh request is for God to “sound the
great shofar of our liberation, to lift up the banner for the gathering of our
exiles and to gather us together from the four corners of the Earth.” This
refers to safe national borders that will provide a haven to all
Jews.

These blessings express the most fundamental needs of a national
homeland: earth to supply the nutrition and natural resources for its people’s
sustenance and secure borders to grant its inhabitants physical security – a
place called home where, in Robert Frost’s words, “when you have to go there,
they have to take you in.”

For most of our 2,000-year exile, no nation
would allow us to own land or farm the produce of their country. (Conversely,
the land of Israel would never yield its fruit, vegetables, grain and flowers to
any of the interloping nations.) Between the horrific years of 1939-1945, all
the Nazis wanted was to make Europe Judenrein; no country would take in the
fleeing, desperate Jews.

No wonder Maimonides rules that the Land of
Israel is only considered sacred when the People of Israel live and work in it
(Laws of the Temple: 6, 11). No wonder Maimonides defines the “Land of Israel”
as the land which God created for Israel, the land which responds only to
Israel, the land which will guarantee Israel’s physical survival. Herein lies
its sanctity: it enables the dry bones of Ezekiel to rise to new
life.

The 11th blessing of the Amida entreats God to “return to His city
and to build it as an eternal building.”

The 12th request is for “the
sprouting of the plant-flower of David and to raise up the horn of God’s
salvation” – the prayer for universal Messianic redemption.

Clearly,
Israel the land and Jerusalem the city engender very different respective hopes
and expectations.

Maimonides describes these separate sanctities in a
unique but oblique fashion. Unlike the sanctity of the Land of Israel, which is
dependent upon the presence of the People of Israel, the sanctity of Jerusalem
is “an eternal sanctity, because the sanctity of Jerusalem is the sanctity of
the Divine Presence, and the Divine Presence can never be
nullified.”

Maimonides cannot possibly be referring to the Divine
Presence as a physical entity, whose physical place is in Jerusalem. That would
be preposterous, because Maimonides insists that God is wholly
incorporeal.

He can be grasped neither intellectually nor
physically.

So what does Maimonides mean when he says that the sanctity
of Jerusalem is the sanctity of the Divine Presence? He must mean that the
Divine Presence resides in the Divine Will, in the Divine Torah which will
emanate from Zion, in the Divine Word which will emanate from Jerusalem to the
entire world (Isaiah 2, Micah 4). This is the true mission of Israel: to attract
all of the gentiles to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, where they will accept the
Divine teaching to “beat their swords into ploughshares,” their nuclear weapons
into atomic energy for healing purposes, “when nation shall not lift up sword
against nation and humanity will not learn war anymore; for the knowledge of the
Lord will fill the world as the waters cover the seas.”

The sanctity of
Israel, the Land of Israel, is bound up with the presence and physical wellbeing
of the People of Israel. The sanctity of Jerusalem, City of Peace (shalem), is
bound up with God and His concern for the world and universal
salvation.

“Zion” is a synonym for Jerusalem. Hence, the goal of Zionism
is not fully fulfilled when the Jews return to and rebuild the land, the State
of Israel. That is only the first level. The goals of Zionism will only be met
when Israel becomes a blessing to all the families of the earth; attracting them
to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and inspiring them to declare fealty to a God of
compassion, morality and peace. Apparently Zionism is still a work in
progress.

The writer is the founder and chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone
Colleges and Graduate Programs, and chief rabbi of Efrat.